On May 23, 1895 representatives of the Astor Library and the Lenox Library with the backing of the Samuel J. Tilden estate agreed to merge and form the New York Public Library. This year, the NYPL celebrated its 125th anniversary in many ways, including compiling a list of  "125 Books We Love" and revealing the "Top 10 Checkouts of All Time."

But what were patrons reading 125 years ago? How do we even know what the popular books were in 1895? We can find the answer because the first American best-seller list was created that year by Harry Thurston Peck, the first editor of a new monthly magazine called The Bookman. He borrowed the idea from an English magazine of the same name. In her article, "The Power of Flawed Lists: How The Bookman Invented the Best Seller" published in Lapham's Quarterly, Elizabeth Della Zazzera explains that at first the best-seller list was broken into several small sections including  listings by American cities (with separate lists for "New York, Uptown" and "New York, Downtown.") Publishers Weekly later compiled these small monthly lists to create single annual lists for 1895-1899 and on to 1912.

Let's take a look at the top 10 best-selling books of 1895 and a few other notable works. Please note: Most of these  books are no longer under copyright in the United States and are now considered to be in the public domain. Many are no longer in print. Clicking on a book's title or cover will lead you to the book's record at the NYPL. You may also find free digital copies at the Hathi Trust Digital Library or Project Gutenberg. The book covers shown are first editions whenever possible.

Top 10 Best Sellers of 1895

1. Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush by Ian Maclaren

This book of short stories was so popular that it was still the number ten best-selling book the following year. The author, whose real name was Dr. John Watson, was a minister, and the stories are based on some of his experiences in rural Scotland. The stories are partly humorous and partly bittersweet, and it would be easy to imagine this book as a Masterpiece Theatre presentation. The characters sometimes speak in a Scottish dialect which can be a bit difficult to understand.

 

 

 

 

 

2. Trilby by George du Maurier

Three artists living in Paris in the 1850s meet Trilby O'Ferrall, an outspoken girl who is working as an artists' model, and they all fall in love with her. Then Trilby meets Svengali, a musician, who hypnotizes her. Under his spell, she becomes a famous singer, always performing in a trance. The book has been adapted for the stage and screen many times. A narrow-brimmed hat worn in the first London production of the play came to be called a trilby. The author, a Franco-British writer and cartoonist, was the grandfather of Daphne du Maurier, author of Rebecca and "The Birds." He was also the grandfather of the boys who inspired J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan. George Orwell and other writers found du Maurier's depiction of Svengali to be anti-Semitic.

 

3. The Adventures of Captain Horn by Frank R. Stockton

Shipwrecks! Hidden treasure! Pirates! Plus a touch of humor and a tiny bit of romance. Treasure Island meets Robinson Crusoe when Captain Horn's three-masted schooner is destroyed in a storm, and he is forced to land on the desolate coast of South America. Aboard as passengers are two women and a young boy. When the crew goes off to find help, those left behind must try to survive. A series of surprising discoveries will soon complicate their lives. Please note: Several of the characters are African men rescued from a slave ship. They have major roles, but still appear to be stereotypes. A sequel, Mrs. Cliff's Yacht, was published in 1897, The author is best known for his children's stories and for the short story, "The Lady, or the Tiger?"

 

 

4. The Manxman by Hall Caine

A Manxman (or Manxwoman) is someone born on the Isle of Man, a self-governing British Crown dependency in the Irish Sea, and the setting for this novel. Kate is loved by two cousins who are her best friends: the poorly educated Peter, and the well-educated Philip. When Kate's father rejects Peter's request to marry his  daughter, Peter sets off for South Africa to earn his fortune. He leaves Philip to look after Kate. All three characters are good-hearted people with the best of intentions, but a series of misunderstandings will lead to unhappiness. The novel uses Manx dialect which can be difficult to understand. It was adapted twice for the stage and twice for films. The second film version was Alfred Hitchcock's last silent movie. Hall Caine was one of the most financially successful writers of his time. One of his books, The Eternal City,  was the first novel to sell more than a million copies worldwide. He also served as secretary and companion to the poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti during the last years of Rossetti's life.

 

5. The Princess Aline by Richard Harding Davis

A successful young American artist falls in love with the picture of a princess in a newspaper and sets off for Europe on a steamship to try to meet her. He is joined on his travels by an older woman and her soon-to-be married niece who help him in his pursuit of the princess. Richard Harding Davis was an American writer and war correspondent. The novel was inspired by Davis' own infatuation with the young Princess Alix of Hesse-Darmstadt, granddaugher of Queen Victoria. Queen Victoria had hoped that Princess Alix would become the Queen Consort of England, but instead Alix would go on to marry Tsar Nicholas II of Russia and become Alexandra Feodorovna, Tsarina of Russia (and mother of Anastasia.) She and her entire family were assassinated in 1918 during the Russian Revolution. The book is illustrated by Charles Dana Gibson, who became known for his pictures of the "Gibson Girl" at the beginning of the twentieth century. The Gibson Girl's male counterpart, the Gibson Man, is said to have been based on the clean-shaven rugged look of Richard Harding Davis.

 

  6. The Days of Auld Lang Syne by Ian Maclaren

This follow-up to The Bonnie Brier Bush was the number six best-selling book in the United States in 1895.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

7. The Master: A Novel by Israel Zangwill

Matthew Strang is a young and talented painter from Nova Scotia who travels to London and sacrifices everything in the hope of becoming a great artist, only to find himself lonely and unhappy. The novel is based closely on the life of George Wylie Hutchinson, Zangwill's friend, who illustrated the works of Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Rudyard Kipling. Hutchinson's paintings inspired the poems "Large Bad Picture" and "Poem" by Elizabeth Bishop, who was his grandniece. Israel Zangwill was a British writer at the forefront of Zionism in the 19th century. His play, The Melting Pot, was a success in the United States and helped popularize that phrase to describe America's absorption of immigrants. The Master presents some stereotypical images, particularly of Native Americans and of women.

 

 

 

8. The Prisoner of Zenda by Anthony Hope (Sir Anthony Hope Hawkins)

Rudolf Rassendyll is a bored English gentleman on holiday in the small fictional European country of Ruritania. When the future King of Ruritania is kidnapped on the eve of his coronation, Rudolf (who looks like the king) is asked to impersonate him to prevent the collapse of the country. Many characters are plotting behind the scenes to take over the throne, and Rudolf along with the beautiful Princess Flavia must try to stay alive long enough to rescue the real king from the Castle of Zenda. The novel has been adapted many times for stage and screen, with the best-known version being the 1937 Hollywood movie. Interestingly, the illustrations by Charles Dana Gibson in the 1898 Macmillan edition show Rudolf and Flavia looking exactly like two characters from The Princess Aline. A prequel of short connected stories, The Heart of Princess Osra, was published in 1896, followed in 1898 by a sequel, Rupert of Hentzau, named after the dashing villain.

 

 

9. Degeneration by Max Nordau (Non-fiction) (Translated from the German)

Max Nordau was a Zionist leader, doctor, and social critic who believed that the artistic and literary movements at the end of the century were leading society to ruin. In this book he attempts to make the case that "Degenerates are not always criminals, prostitutes, anarchists, and pronounced lunatics; they are often authors and artists." He then attacks the works of Wagner, Tolstoy, Whitman, Ibsen, Nietzsche, and Oscar Wilde, among others, or as William James commented in The Varieties of Religious Experience, "such works of contemporary art, namely, as he himself is unable to enjoy, and they are many." The ideas in the book have been widely discredited since it was published.

 

 

 

 

10. My Lady Nobody by Maarten Maartens

This novel tells the story of a Dutch pastor's daughter and the two wealthy brothers who love her. Maarten Maartens was the pen name of Jozua Marius Willem van der Poorten Schwartz, a Dutch writer who wrote in English. (He chose this pen name because he felt it sounded very Dutch and was easy to remember.) He was popular in the United States and the United Kingdom but not in his own country, and has been mostly forgotten since his death in 1915.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Eleven More Works of Interest from 1895—In Alphabetical Order

11. Almayer's Folly by Joseph Conrad

Kaspar Almayer, a Dutch trader, lives beside a river in Borneo and dreams of finding a mountain of gold, rumored to be hidden deep in the jungle. Next to his small house is the grand but unfinished mansion that people call Almayer's Folly. Will his dreams be fulfilled, or will they be transformed by his misunderstanding of the many cultures that clash around him and around his Malayan wife and daughter? Some of the characters hold stereotypical visions of women and of other cultures, but these visions appear to be presented by the author as tragic flaws. This was Joseph Conrad's first novel. Pair it with Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman (1949) which seems to echo some of the same themes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

12. A House-Boat on the Styx by John Kendrick Bangs

In Greek mythology, the River Styx forms the boundary between Earth and the Underworld. Charon is the ferryman who transports the newly dead across the river. Imagine Charon's surprise when he discovers a house-boat docked along the banks of the Styx. Inside he finds an exclusive men's club whose members are the shades of famous dead humans and mythological characters. What follows is a collection of loosely connected comedic stories in which humans of all time perioids confront and take satiric jabs at each other. Picture this as a series of Saturday Night Live sketches. John Kendrick Bangs was the editor of Puck, the most famous American humor magazine of its day. This book reached number six on the best-seller list in 1896. It was followed by a sequel The Pursuit of the House-Boat... under the Leadership of Sherlock Holmes, Esq. in 1897.

 

 

 

13. The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde

Jack: I don't actually know who I am by birth. I was... well, I was found.

Lady Bracknell: Found!

Jack (Gravely): In a hand-bag.

Lady Bracknell: A hand-bag?

First performed in London in February 1895, this satiric play tells the story of two young men who lead double lives in order to run away from their social obligations. The successful opening night marked the peak of Wilde's career. Several months later he found himself on trial and sentenced to two years in prison with hard labor on charges of being a homosexual. (The first edition of the book was not published until 1898 by a small publisher who was the only one brave enough after Wilde's trial to do it. Wilde's name does not appear on the cover.) The play is still popular today and has been performed on stage and screen many times.

14. Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy

"Done because we are too menny."

Find out the tragic meaning behind these words in this novel about Jude Fawley, a working-class young man who dreams of becoming a scholar and studying at Christminster University (modeled on Oxford.) Determined to succeed, he studies Greek and Latin on his own, but is tricked into an early unhappy marriage and becomes a stonemason. Further trouble makes it increasingly difficult for him to reach his goal. This was Thomas Hardy's last completed novel. The book has been presented on stage and screen, and it might be fun to pair it with a film about another stone cutter interested in going to university: Breaking Away (1979), screenplay by Steve Tesich.

 

 

 

15. The King in Yellow and Other Horror Stories by Robert W. Chambers

"Have you found the Yellow Sign?"

That haunting phrase echoes through this collection of psychologically weird supernatural short stories. The stories are tied together by a fictional play called The King in Yellow, a forbidden play which causes those who read it to go insane. The characters are often struggling artists, and several of the stories are set in an imagined future 1920s New York City near Washington Square. Considered a classic in the field of the supernatural, the book borrows names from Ambrose Bierce's writings, and went on to influence H.P. Lovecraft and others.

 

 

 

 

16. Lilith by George MacDonald

Is the old library haunted? Mr. Vane believes it is—by the former librarian who appears in the form of a raven. When Vane follows the raven through a mirror into a parallel world, he meets Lilith, Adams's first wife and princess of the land of Bulika. George MacDonald was a Scottish author and Christian minister best known for his children's fantasy stories such as The Princess and the Goblin. He was a major influence on writers such as Lewis Carroll and C.S. Lewis. Lilith is considered among the darkest and most adult of MacDonald's works. It is an allegory about the nature of life, death, and salvation.

 

 

 

 

 

17. The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane

"It had suddenly appeared to him that perhaps in a battle he might run."

This novel of the American Civil War tells the story of a young man who joins the Union Army with dreams of becoming a hero, only to flee during one of his first battles. Wandering through the countryside, sometimes far from the war, he wishes he had a wound, a "red badge of courage," to prove to himself that he is not a coward. Stephen Crane was born after the Civil War, and had never seen a battle when he wrote this book. He based it on written accounts in Century Magazine, and possibly on stories he heard veterans tell in the town square of Port Jervis, New York. The book is considered to be one of the most realistic depictions of war, partly because it concentrates on the inner experience of the main character. Crane became instantly famous at the age of 24 when the book was published. He died of tuberculosis four years later, and his work was nearly forgotten until the 1920s when critics revived interest in his novels and short stories. The Red Badge of Courage reached number eight on the best-seller list in 1896.

18. The Second Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling

This is the sequel to The Jungle Book  which had been published the year before. It contains five new stories about Mowgli and his wild animal friends, plus three unrelated stories. Although most of these tales are set in India, where Kipling was born, he wrote them while he was living in Dummerston, Vermont, near Brattleboro.

 

 

 

 

 

19. The Story of the Other Wise Man by Henry Van Dyke

"You know the story of the Three Wise Men of the East... But have you ever heard the story of the Other Wise Man, who also saw the star in its rising, and set out to follow it, yet did not arrive with his brethren...?"

This expansion of the biblical story tells about a fourth wise man who sets out to see the newborn child, carrying three precious gifts. On the way, he stops to help a dying man which makes him too late to join the caravan of the other three wise men. He then travels the world, slowly selling his gifts to help others, and always too late to find the one he is looking for. Until one day... Henry Van Dyke was an American author, professor of English literature at Princeton, ambassador to the Netherlands at the start of World War I, and the minister who performed the services at Mark Twain's funeral.

 

 

 

20. The Time Machine by H.G. Wells

" 'This little affair,' said the Time Traveller, resting his elbows upon the table and pressing his hands together above the apparatus, 'is only a model. It is my plan for a machine to travel through time.' "

In his first novel, H.G. Wells invented the term "time machine" to describe a device that will permit travel through time, and thus created the whole genre of stories that deal with this type of imagined travel. The book has been adapted many times for film and television. Herbert George Wells was an English writer who wrote many types of books and stories. He is best remembered for his groundbreading science fiction novels, including The War of the Worlds and The Invisible Man, and is considered by many to be the "father of science fiction."

 

 

21. The Woman's Bible by Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Elizabeth Cady Stanton was a leader of the women's rights movement in the United States. She organized the first women's rights convention at Seneca Falls, NY with Lucretia Mott, and founded the National Woman Suffrage Movement with Susan B. Anthony. The Woman's Bible is a two-part non-fiction book, written by Stanton and a committee of 26 women. Part I was published in 1895 and contains commentary on the first five books of the Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, from the perspective of women. Many women's rights activists who worked with Stanton were opposed to the publication, believing that it would harm the movement for women's suffrage.